Etta Candy

Back during the old days of comics, when they were somehow more ridiculous than they are now, DC gave Wonder Woman a best friend. Discovered as a malnourished women stuck in a hospital bed, Wonder Woman returned to the hospital to find that very same woman overweight. Supposedly, Etta was made whole from the powerful, rejuvenating effects of candy. This super healthy rejuvenation then gave Etta a disposition toward candy, which she continued to eat. The character was created during a time when writers didn’t exactly know how to handle an overweight character — comic relief or not — without referencing their weight roughly every chance they got. So, not only would some people find Etta offensive, but she was also a slave to one running gag that wasn’t even funny. On top of that, she usually played the role of the character that is in perpetual danger, always in need of a hero rolling their eyes, shrugging, then begrudgingly saving her again.

Dermott Fictel

Venture Bros. is one of the best shows on television, but that doesn’t stop it from having one of the most obnoxious, useless sidekicks in the realm of entertainment media. The show’s titular brothers, Hank and Dean, are regularly useless, but occasionally come through and save the day, while their obnoxiousness is mercifully just within the borders of humor. Unfortunately, Hank’s pal and sidekick, Dermott — employing that Napoleon Dynamite sense of antihumor — crossed the sacred borders of humor of long ago. Dermott, like Napoleon, falls prey to that type of (supposed) humor where a character believes he or she is a master martial artist or super badass when clearly they are not.

Unlike Hank and Dean, Dermott still hasn’t ever come through in the end — regarding anything — instead opting to boast about nunchucks or how he’d fight someone rather than actually fighting that someone. At least in the scheme of narrative, Dermott provides a foil for Hank, who is normally so inept at just about everything that comparing Hank to Dermott is an efficient way to convey Hank’s gradual character development.

Whitewash Jones

As the treatment of Etta Candy showed, comic book writers didn’t always know how to deal with potentially sensitive topics. Back in the early 1940s, Marvel’s own Jack Kirby launched a book for a superhero team made up of sidekicks, the Young Allies, led by Captain America’s famed sidekick Bucky. Unfortunately, one of the team members was called Whitewash Jones, and as you can see above, wasn’t handled with the utmost of care. It was the early 1940s, years before the Civil Rights Movement, but basically: come on, Marvel.

Past the racial stereotyping, Whitewash was dimwitted and regularly got the group into trouble more than he contributed to remedying a situation. Thankfully, the character was abandoned only a few years after his introduction. He was eventually brought back into the Marvel universe as an old man in the modern age, without any of the stereotypes, yet still didn’t play much of a role other than participating in war parades.

Sidekicks don’t have to be the worst character in a story — in worthwhile material, they are often the main character, providing a side of a story that we don’t usually get to see. Unfortunately, the very nature of the sidekick tends to get them glossed over and used for a cheap, easy effect, like comic relief or as a vehicle for the main character to heroically save someone. Other times, though, we get terrible sidekicks that provide us with a character that we masochistically love to hate.